Photographer
Patrick McMullan
qualifies as the Cartier-Bresson—or is it Weegee?—of the New York social scene.

Mr. McMullan and his staff of 16 shooters are out every night. They have hit 14 benefits, movie premieres and gallery openings on one evening alone.

And while it is mostly A- and B-list celebrities and socialites whose pictures make it into the publications and onto the websites that use his photos—including New York, Vanity Fair and, yes, The Wall Street Journal—no one seems too modest to catch his eye.

“We photograph everybody at the party,” said Anita Antonini, Mr. McMullan’s right hand. “Even the waiters.”

Search a party-going editorial assistant, publicist or real-estate broker, and chances are his or her thumbnail will pop up somewhere on Patrick McMullan.com.

“I’m an attention-giver in a world that has lots of attention-seekers,” Mr. McMullan said as he ate his first meal of the day—a brownie—at 5 p.m. He was sitting in the lobby of the Hearst Tower, where an exhibition of Hearst editors he photographed, as well as candids of the New York Fashion Week’s Spring 2015 collections, opens Wednesday night.

“We could have 10 events here,” he said with characteristic enthusiasm as he examined the building’s soaring atrium. “There’s a six-month window of doing stuff.”

Dianne Brill and Sting in a 1984 photograph by Mr. McMullan.
Patrick McMullan

Mr. McMullan was referring to the length of the show, a time frame that would hearten any artist who wants his or her work seen.

But the opportunity may be especially poignant in Mr. McMullan’s case: If there’s any photographer working in New York City today who traffics in the ephemeral, it is him.

If Mr. McMullan has a gift, beyond a capacity for hard work, an easygoing charm, and an eye for beauty, it is a working-class mien that cuts through the self-regard that seems an occupational hazard among members of New York’s photogenic class.

“The most elegant thing is people who are consistent,” he explained. “You treat people the same all the time.”

His current pet peeve is the selfie.

“The celebrities are annoyed by it, too,” he said—technology interfering with direct experience, life becoming an extended photo-op. “Nobody is living and going and doing.”

His passion for photography dates to the 1960s when he was growing up on Long Island.

“Nixon was coming to the mall,” he remembered of the 1968 Republican presidential nominee Richard M. Nixon. “I decided I’d go and see if I could get a picture. They let me right up—‘Let the kid get a picture.’

“Nixon waved to me. There was no film. It was the greatest picture I didn’t take. It taught me one thing. Always be prepared.”

Mr. McMullan attended New York University and gained entree to Andy Warhol and the Studio 54 crowd. He said he learned important life lessons from the artist.

Even though Mr. McMullan runs a company with 50 employees, has published six books and has a website that gets hundreds of thousands of hits a month, he still lives in the same one-bedroom apartment on lower Fifth Avenue that he has rented since 1977.

“When I had my darkroom set up, I didn’t even have to close the windows,” he boasted. “It was dark. It is on the first floor. Even on 9/11 I just walked in.”

Mr. McMullan has worked for so many publications that some escape him; we bonded over the Soho Weekly News, which gave us both our first break.

But New York was a game changer.

“It was the big thing to be on my page in New York magazine,” he said. “Everybody wanted me to be at their events.”

Aspiring socialities trying to worm their way into photographs where they don’t belong is a perennial scourge.

“I’m a destination and there’s nothing wrong with that,” he explained. “But some people keep coming back to the destination.”

Nonetheless, his brownie finished, and a blueberry muffin as well, he picked up his camera and prepared to become a destination on yet another evening.

“I’ll go to this thing for Aperture,” he said, of one benefit. And then, “I should be at Alzheimer’s.”